What Are the Options When It Comes to Paint?
Having decided you’d like to learn to paint, you obviously need to select what kind of paint you’re going to use. The most commonly used paints are acrylics, oils, watercolors, and pastels. (These are certainly not the only options, just the most popular and the best place to start.) Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Which you select will depend on your personality and, to some extent, where you’re going to paint. This article will help you decide, as will the Painting Personality Quiz.
Besides the characteristics of the different types of paint, there are also a few other considerations:
· Cost: Top-quality paint and canvas is expensive but dirt-cheap paint won’t give you good results when mixing colors. You need to find a balance between paint that’s of a quality to give good colors but cheap enough that you don’t worry too much about using it up (or wasting it).
· Poison hazards: If you’ve small children, you may not want to have the solvents used in oil painting lying around. Some people are also allergic to the solvents, in which case you might investigate low-odor versions or are water-based oil paints. Soft pastels can product a lot of dust; be careful to minimize the amount you inhale. For example, don’t blow on your work to remove loose pastel. Poisonous pigments, such as cadmium red, are usually available as a non-toxic hue. Not that any paint is made to be eaten! (See Also: Safety Tips for Using Art Materials).
Personally I think acrylics are the best choice for beginners as they’re easy to learn to use, dilute and clean up with water, and there are brands available that are a good balance between quality and price. So let’s look at the Advantages of Acrylics…
Advantages of Acrylic Paint:
Dries very fast. Mixed with water or mediums/gels. Brushes cleaned with water. Once dried, can be overpainted without disturbing underlying layers. Can be used thickly (impasto), like oils, or in thin washes, like watercolor. Water-resistant, so good for murals. Works as a glue, so good for collages.
Disdvantages of Acrylic Paint:
Dries very fast, though working time can be increased by adding retarding medium to paint or spraying water on a painting. Completely waterproof once dried, so cannot be removed by rewetting the paint. Difficult to remove from a brush if it’s dried in it. Except when used in thin washes, colors dry a bit darker than when applied.
How Expensive is Acrylic Paint to Use?
There is a large range of acrylics on the market, from top-quality paints with high pigment content to cheap paints with little pigment and lots of filler. You will need a selection of colors, at least one brush, and some paper or canvas to paint on. You don’t need anything other than tap water to dilute the paint or to clean the brush.
Advantages of Oil Paint:
Dries slowly, allowing plenty of time to work and to blend colors. Once dried, can be overpainted without disturbing underlying layers. Rich, deep colors which maintain their intensity when dry. Can be used thickly or in thin, smooth glazes. Then there’s the status factor, oils being what the Old Masters used. (Take the quiz: Acrylics or Oils? to help you decide.)
Disadvantages of Oil Paint:
Mixed with solvents and oils, so need to work in a well-ventilated area. Slow-drying, so consider working on several paintings at once. Have to wait several months to ensure a painting is dry before it can be varnished. Brushes need to be cleaned with white spirit or similar solvent. Water-based oils are produced by several paint manufacturers.
How Expensive is Oil Paint to Use?
There is a large range of acrylics on the market, from top-quality paints with high pigment content to cheap paints with little pigment and lots of filler. You will need a selection of colors, at least one brush, some canvas to paint on, medium to dilute the paint, a palette for putting out your colors and mixing them.
Advantages of Watercolor Paint:
· Watercolors: Mixed with water and brushes cleaned with water. Paint can be lifted off by rewetting. If paint squeezed from a tube has dried, it becomes reusable if you add water. This is, afterall, the state pans or blocks of watercolor come in (see How To Choose Between Pan and Tube Watercolors).
Disadvantages of Watercolor Paint:
· Watercolors: Being quite transparent, it’s hard to rectify or hide mistakes in a watercolor painting. Need to allow for colours being lighter once they’ve dried than how they appeared when you painted. There is no white paint in watercolor; the white comes from the paper you’re painting on.
How Expensive is Watercolor to Use?
Watercolors are the cheapest to set yourself up with; all you need buy is a set of basic colors, a brush or two of different sizes, some paper, plus a board and brown gummed tape if you intend to stretch the paper.
Advantages of Pastels:
There’s no waiting for pastels to dry. Colors are mixed on the paper, not on a palette, by overlaying or blending them (see Basic Techniques for Pastels). A wide range of colors are available. No brushes to clean. Easy to use outside the studio. Oil-based pastels can be thinned and blended with turpentine, or scrapped off to reveal colors underneath, known as sgraffito.
Disadvantages of Pastels:
Usually requires a greater range of colours to create a picture than for other media. Different brands and pigments vary in softness. Soft pastel works tend to be liable to smudging and the pastel coming off the support. This can be prevented by using a spray-on fixative, taping a piece of tracing paper over it, or framing it with a mount that keeps it away from the glass.
How Expensive is Pastel to Use?
You will need a range of colors, some paper, a board to hold the paper, and some fixative.
Pastels can be used in a variety of ways, outlined here. Each of these pastel techniques can be used on their own, or combined, to produce a pastel painting. There is no right or wrong way. As with so many things in painting, it comes down to what you enjoy doing with your pastels.
Remember to try each pastel technique with different pastels — hard, semi-soft, and soft — as each gives a slightly different result, as will the various pastel brands.
My Painting Personality Quiz Results: What Paint Should You Use?
The answers you selected in the Painting Personality Quiz suggest that you’d be happiest using pastels or acrylics.
With pastels you get instant results, there’s no waiting for paint to dry, nor brushes to clean afterwards. Acrylics are very fast drying and, once dried, can be overpainted without disturbing underlying layers.
Find out more about Painting with Pastels and Painting with Acrylics.
Painting with Acrylics.
Gone are the days when acrylics were what artists allergic to the solvents in oil painting used. Acrylics have their own advantages, characteristics, and unique possibilities. Here you’ll find helpful tips, essential techniques, and step-by-step demonstrations on using acrylic paints for artists of all levels.
Best 11 Brands of Acrylic Paint
acrylic
Every artist will have their own preferred brand of acrylic paint, based on things such as the colors available and the consistency of the paint, which ranges from extremely buttery to fluid. Rather buy a few quality colors than a whole range of cheap colors. (And, remember, student acrylic paints are cheaper for a reason: they’ve usually more filler in them, or made from cheaper pigments.) Here are my personal favorites from the brands I’ve used in paintings.
Acrylic Paints: Golden Artist Colors Heavy Body
My favorite brand of acrylic paint is Golden’s Heavy Body acrylics. Golden is an American company created specifically to produce top-quality acrylic paints for artists. I love the range of vibrant colors, which includes an extremely useful set of neutral grays. The paint consistency is very smooth, thinning down for glazes easily. (Golden also produce fluid acrylics, a matt acrylic, and a slow-drying acrylic.)
Acrylic Paints: Golden’s Open Acrylics
""Photo © Golden Artist Colors
Launched in mid-2008, Golden’s Open Acrylics have an extended drying time, making them more comparable to oil paints rather than ‘traditional’ acrylic paints. Open Acrylics stay workable on a normal palette for hours rather than minutes, eliminating the need for a moisture-retaining palette. Open Acrylics provide the ease of using water as a medium (and for cleaning brushes) with a long working and blending time. The color range isn’t as extensive as for Golden’s Heavy Duty acrylics, but the fundamentals are included.
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Acrylic Paints: Liquitex
""Image ©2007 Marion Boddy-Evans
My second favorite brand acrylic paint is Liquitex’s Heavy Body Professional Artist Colors, not least because they come in ‘plastic’ tubes which are incredibly robust. (To be technically accurate, Liquitex comes in Glaminate, tubes made from laminated layers of plastic, metal, and paper.) The paint’s consistency is quite buttery and ’sticky’, and I enjoy using it with a palette knife.
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Acrylic Paints: Winsor & Newton Finity
""Image ©2007 Marion Boddy-Evans
I’ve a lot of tubes of Winsor and Newton Finity acrylic paint because I think they’re the best option in terms of affordability and quality. There’s a good range of colors available and they’re widely distributed in several countries. The paint consistency is generally thicker than Golden or Liquitex, making it great for impasto or knife work. The range includes a useful ‘mixing white’ which has a slightly thinner consistency.
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Acrylic Paints: M. Graham & Co.
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If you wanted an acrylic paint with a long working time, them M. Graham & Co’s would be top of your list (working in a hot, dry climate, they give me about half an hour). But as I’m an impatient painter and I work mostly in glazes which I want to dry quickly, I don’t need to extra working time very often. The colors are sumptuous — very strong and saturated — and blend together beautifully. If you were used to working in oils and wanted to swap to acrylics, this would be the brand to try.
Acrylic Paints: Daler-Rowney
As Daler-Rowney artist’s quality paints (Cryla) are generally cheaper than Golden, Liquitex, or Winsor and Newton, I use them if I’ve got a large area to cover, especially in an underpainting. I’ve found some colors (e.g. Prussian blue) are a bit darker than other brands, which can be useful. The consistency of the paint is stiff to buttery. (Daler-Rowney’s student acrylic range is branded System 3.)
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Acrylic Paints: Matisse Structure Formula
""Image ©2007 Marion Boddy-Evans
Matisse structure paint is a ‘normal’ acrylic paint that does what you’d expect from a decent artist’s quality acrylic. Probably the only unexpected thing about it is that it’s made in Australia and has some unique color names (such as Southern Ocean Blue, or Australia Sky Blue). It has a soft, buttery consistency that will hold brushmarks if used undiluted, straight from the tube. It can be diluted with water and/or medium for painting without leaving brushmarks, for glazing, or for watercolor-type techniques. To increase the impasto effect, you’d mix it with impasto or texture medium.
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Acrylic Paints: Atelier Interactive
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The ‘big deal’ about these acrylic paints is that, according to the manufacturer, they “dry differently”, that they don’t form a skin as they dry so you can rehydrate them to keep working wet-in-wet by spraying some water on the paint or using a wet brush. I found I could indeed work back into the paint with a wet brush, which makes blending colors less of an urgency and easier. If you do a lot of blending of colors rather than glazing, consider this brand of acrylic.
Acrylic Paints: Utrecht
""Image © Marion Boddy-Evans
This is an American brand of paint which seems to be distributed only in the US. I first bought various tubes from a Utrecht store in New York because the price was competitive with more familiar brands. The paint is thickly buttery but spreads easily when diluted. The colors are what you’d expect from an artist’s grade paint: saturated, with good tinting or covering strength depending on what color it is. While I wouldn’t make a special trip to get hold of it, if it’s one of the options at your local store, it’s worth considering.
Manufacturer’s Site
Acrylic Paints: Winsor & Newton Galeria Flow Formula
""Image © Marion Boddy-Evans
While I’m a great believer in using quality artist’s paints sometimes it’s too inhibiting because you’re worrying about wasting the paint. Then it’s better to use a good student’s quality paint that enables you to feel free to experiment, to just see what happens if you do something, to scrape off paint and paint over something. Winsor & Newton’s Galeria brand is an affordable or student’s grade of paint that has good strength in colors and works easily (though you’ll have to add texture paste if you want thick paint as it’s quite soft paint). And it doesn’t put too huge a dent in your pocket.
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Acrylic Paints: Other Brands
""Image ©2007 Marion Boddy-Evans
There are a number of other brands of acrylic paint on the market, for example: Lascaux, Grumbacher, Schmincke, Utrecht, Brera (Maimeri). Of these I’ve used only a few tubes of Brera (Buy Direct). My suggestion would be to check on the tube to see what pigments the paint is made from, whether it’s been graded as lightfast, and buy a tube in a color you use regularly to see how it compares to what you usually use. (See Assessing a New Brand of Acrylic or Oil Paint for more tips.)
How To Clean Your Paint Brushes
Your brushes are an investment. By cleaning them thoroughly and properly at the end of a painting session, they will last longer.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: Time worth spending
How To Stretch Your Own Canvas
Stretching your own canvas is easier than you may think, and possibly cheaper.
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painters will agree that there’s nothing like painting on canvas. But pre-stretched and primed canvases can be expensive, which means that all too often we keep our canvases for ‘good’ paintings. By stretching your own canvas, you can not only save money, but get something you’re willing to experiment on. You also get a canvas that’s exactly the size you’re after.
You’ll need the following supplies from an art store:
· Unprimed cotton canvas.
· Four stretchers (the wood that makes up the frame). If you’ve some DIY skills, you can make these yourself.
· Staple gun and staples (or carpet tacks and hammer).
· Stretcher frame keys or corner keys (small wedges used to tighten the completed canvas).
The first step is to join the stretchers. Lay them out on the floor, then push the corners together by hand. If necessary, tap the corners gently on a carpet or with a rubber hammer (be careful not to dent the wood). Check that they’re at right angles, either with a set square if you require mathematical precision or with something that has a fairly accurate right angle on it, such as a book.
Roll out your canvas, put the frame on top of it, then cut it to size, remembering that the canvas has to fold over the outside edge of the stretchers. Rather be over-generous in the size you cut and trim off the excess when you’ve stretched your canvas.
Stretch Canvas with Logic, Not Randomly
The most important things to remember when attaching your canvas to the stretchers is to work from the middle outwards and in opposites. So, starting in the center on any side, staple the canvas to the back of the stretcher. Put in about three staples, approximately two inches apart. With your first few canvases, you’ll probably put in more staples than you need; practice will give you a feel for this. Move to the opposite side, pull the canvas taught, and staple the middle in place. Repeat with the other two edges.
Now staple one edge from the middle to the one side. Remember to pull the canvas as tight as you can – an extra pair of hands is useful. Then do the same on the edge that is diagonally opposite. Continue like this until all the edges are in place. If you’re stretching a very large canvas, don’t staple all the way to the corner in one go. You’ll get better tension by doing it in sections.
At the corners, fold the edges of the canvas neatly and staple the one on top of the other. If your canvas needs a little tightening, tap in the frame keys. But don’t rely on these. If you find your tension isn’t good, rather remove the staples and start again.
Tips for Stretching Canvas:
· Stretchers are usually sold in pairs, so by buying sets of different lengths, you can make a rectangular canvas rather than a square one.
· Get a strong friend to help you by holding the canvas in place while you staple it.
· If your local art store doesn’t sell unprimed canvas by the yard, buy it from an on-line supplier. Alternately, ask your local fabric store if they’ve got heavy-duty, unbleached calico. Smooth any imperfections with a piece of fine sandpaper or nail file.
· You can make your own stretchers from 1″x2″ wood, cutting miter corners which you join with corrugated nails.
Six Things To Decide Before Starting to Paint
Essential decisions to make before you start a painting.
Is it necessary to plan a painting in careful detail before you start, or should you let it evolve as you go along? Planning a painting can be a help as you know exactly what you’re going to do, but it could also inhibit spontaneity. Letting a painting evolve as you work is very free and lets you be spontaneous, but also leaves you open to the possibility that the painting won’t go anywhere and you’ll end up with a mess.
Ultimately the degree to which you plan out a painting depends on your personality, some people find it essential and others a hindrance. But regardless of how detailed you like to plan (or not), there are several decisions that have to be made before you to start to paint.
1. Decide On a Subject
Deciding on a subject is the logical first step as it influences the format of the support, the type of support used, and the technique you’re going to use to create the painting. If you’ve only a vague idea of what to do with an appealing subject, such as a glorious landscape, sketching or doing small studies rather than a full painting will enable you to see whether the composition and selection of elements works well without wasting time or materials. A pleasing study can then be used as the basis or reference for a full-scale painting.
But if you find that doing a study makes you stiffen up when you come to do the large-scale painting because you’re focusing on replicating it, rather than it reminding you sufficiently of the original scene, consider doing only quick sketches to see if a composition works and taking reference photos to work from back in your studio.
2. Decide On the Format
Having decided on a subject, you need to decide what the best format for the support is, whether it should be landscape or portrait, or perhaps square. What shape of the canvas will best suit the subject matter? For example, a very long and thin canvas used in adds a sense of drama to a landscape, especially one of a wide-open space.
3. Decide On the Size
The size the support will be should also be a conscious decision. A painting shouldn’t be a particular size simply because that’s the size of the sheet of paper you have. If you buy primed and stretched canvases, have several in various sizes to hand so you’ve a choice. Think about how the subject would look if it were painted small, or perhaps very large. Are you going to work lifesize or oversized? For example, portraits which are oversized are very dramatic.
4. Decide On a Medium and Technique
If you only ever use one medium then you don’t have to decide which one you think is best for this particular subject. But what about the technique you’re going to use? For example, if you use acrylics, are you going to use them thickly or thinly, like watercolors, are you going to use retarders to slow down the drying time? If you use watercolors, are you going to use masking fluid to keep areas white?
5. Decide On the Type of Support
Are you going to paint on canvas, primed hardboard, or paper? Will it be a canvas with a fine weave, such as linen, or a coarse weave that will show through? Will it be a smooth, hot-pressed paper or a rougher watercolor paper? This is a decision that not only influences the texture of the final work, but also how you work, for example canvas will stand heavy impasto being reworked repeatedly. Alternately, the technique you’re wishing to use will determine the best support.
If you are using oils, acrylics, or gouache, will you be using a ground and what color should it be? How about using a complementary colour to the main colour in the picture? If you are using pastels, what colour paper will you use? And will you lay down an initial layer of complementary colors?
6. Decide On Colors
Are you going to use color realistically or not? Are you going to use whatever colors you’ve got or select out a few to make up a palette just for that painting? Working with a limited range of colors can contribute to a sense of unity in a painting and great a sense of identify or unity between paintings.
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